Practical strategies for the role of digital in your business

Digital Transformation – An Outside in process

Why you want to own the customer experience

No matter what business we are in, we must own the customer experience.

We live in a world now where our expectations, as customers or consumers has changed dramatically from those we had 20 years ago. The digital economy has contributed to this and largely facilitated it.

New technology facilitates all this change. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and mobile are a few dominant forces that essentially reshape our expectations as consumers; everything is hyper personal now.

(As a note to the strategists and marketers – this means traditional segmentation is getting stale. Hyper personalisation is possible and already expected by your customers).

Resorting to simply activating more & more channels is not showing your customers that you understand them and that you can deliver them a message that is the right time, place and mindset, or the on device of their choice.

Any experience with a company that is not hyper personal, relevant and tailored to our situation is a “mhew” experience. Customers know you collect data so use it so that they benefit from that.

This forces us to reimagine the companies we run. We must be in the business of creating solutions to human problems.

Ouch.

We are all customers and consumers alike and we are all expecting more now from our interactions with companies. But when we walk into our offices we often revert to business-as-usual. According to Forrester 80% of businesses think they do customer experience well, but only 8% of customers agree with that. T.h.a.t is some gap.

It’s an outside -in process. Your customers have changed, how they want to interact with you has changed, what they expect from you has shifted and your business models and processes will need to adapt to that. It’s do or die.

What is digital transformation?

This is what we call digital transformation. It simply means that constantly evolving and changing market behaviours and technologies drive your business and that you re-align existing, or invest in brand new;

Technology

Business models

Processes

Skills & resources

You do all of this because;

1 – You need to drive new value for customers

You can’t just buy a new CRM system or build a new website and be done with it. You have to start by evaluating what’s different about your customers. How has their behaviour changed and how does this affect the value they now expect?

2 – Staff are going to make it happen

Digital transformation is not just about technology, it’s about people and therefore about change-management. Big organisational change means that existing skill-sets may need to evolve.

For example, with the help of new technology, say Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a marketing manager may finally feel that the new tool will make them look like demi-gods. They can finally tailor messages to individuals rather than to whole market segments, and thus become more relevant. (resulting in more sales or conversions)

However, the skills required to map out a myriad of customer journeys, and automate the response process is far more technical than any generalist marketer has had to deal with previously. Therefore their skill-set will have to evolve too. It’s do or die.

You may also have to hire people with skillsets you didn’t think you needed before. For example; A business analysis who can make sense of your data and help you get insights about what changes your business needs to make to better service customers or potential customers, will be a vital asset to your team.

Ad 3 – You need to stay in the game. Disrupt or be disrupted

If you keep doing business as usual you’ll actively make yourself irrelevant. Even if you think your industry and category is still miles away from all “this modern stuff”, your customers’ changing behaviours will be driven by other categories and thus still affect you.